Tea at Trianon: Lammas Day

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Lammas Day

From The New Liturgical Movement:

“Lammas” is a contraction of “Loaf Mass,” one of about two dozen words in the English language that have the word “Mas” or “Mass” in them. (Christmas is the most famous, but there are others as well.) Lammas Day was the first harvest festival of the season, the time to celebrate the first-fruits of the wheat and barley crops. These cereals were important to the Anglo-Saxons, as can be seen from other aspects of their language: the English word “lord” means “bread-guardian,” while “lady” means “bread-kneader.” We know that Lammas Day was a feast of Bread, but we are not entirely certain how it was celebrated. Mention is made in some sources of taking a loaf to Mass that day to have it blessed, but unlike other seasonal blessings (such as those found in the Roman Ritual), there does not seem to be a specific formula. We do, however, have one fascinating fragment from a nonliturgical source that recommends blessed Lammas bread as a mouse repellent. If you place crumbs of blessed bread in the four corners of your barn, and a cross on the floor of the barn entrance with the Pater Noster written on both pieces of wood, your barn will be just like the city of Jerusalem, where mice “do not live and cannot have power”, and where they cannot “rejoice with the wheat”! [Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 196] (Read more.)